How One CEO Creates Joy at Work

Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, says it took him years to learn what really mattered at work and how to create that kind of workplace culture. As a company leader today, he works hard to make sure both his job — and the jobs of his employees — are joyful. That doesn’t mean they are happy 100% of the time, he argues, but that they feel fulfilled by always putting the customer first. Sheridan is the author of Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear.

Say the name Thomas Edison, and you think of the light bulb, the phonograph, and the big businesses he built around them. But do you think of workplace culture?

There’s a biography titled “Working at Inventing” that describes Edison’s famous laboratory at Menlo Park. The work life there was – quote — “punctuated by gambling, practical jokes, and rowdy sing-songs at the organ … The all-night experimental sessions, with their midnight feasts and hours of storytelling, became as an important part of the Edison myth as the inventions themselves.”

One employee said: “The strangest thing to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday, for my labor does not seem like work … I enjoy it.”

Those stories of Menlo Park inspired our guest today. A software engineer for years, Richard Sheridan says his work was as far from joy as he could get. So when he co-founded his own enterprise software company, he named it Menlo Innovations. He wanted his work, and the work of his employees, to be joyful.

He has a new book out about it, and he’s here to tell us what he’s doing. Rich, thanks for coming on the show.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Thanks for having me, Curt.

CURT NICKISCH: You’ve written two books about joy, first “Joy, Inc.” and now “Chief Joy Officer,” but I want to take you back maybe to a non-joyful place and I want to ask about maybe the worst job you had or maybe the worst day at that job that you had?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah, I graduated from Michigan in 1982 with a master’s degree in computer engineering and took a job here in Ann Arbor – a place that I had interned for a few years in and it started getting accolades from my new boss and the team I worked with and that sort of thing. And my boss came in, and says, “Rich, we’re going to put you in charge of a new project.”

And I looked at him and I said, “Awesome. Hey, I want to do a really good job. So I’d like to get out and talk to actual customers, people who will one day use the thing we’re going to create because I really want to thrill them. I want this to be a terrific thing.” And he said, “Nope. No, we got Jim for that.”

And I could already feel my heart sinking in that moment, but I tried to keep my optimistic self. I said, “Absolutely, I’ll talk to Jim, but I also want to get out and talk to customers.” And he looks at me and says, “You’re not getting this, are you?” I said “What do you mean?” He says, “Well, if you keep bugging me to talk to customers, I’ll stick you in customer service.”

So I looked at him and said “That’d be awesome. I mean I’d be able to talk to customers all day long and be able to understand what excites them, what their greatest needs are, where they’re having problems and that could really fuel my understanding of what it will take to build a great product.”

And he finally looks at me and says, “You’re really not getting this, are you? If I stick you in customer service, you’re never coming out.”

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. “Get back in that box” is basically what he was saying.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: And do what I tell you to do. And I will tell you in that moment I quit. I didn’t quit that day. I quit about two weeks later, but I decided this wasn’t the place for me. This wasn’t the boss for me. I’m not interested in staying here because I want to do great work. I want to create great things for the world.

And so that was the first sort of clanging cymbal moment in my career where I realized, “Oh, this isn’t going to go as easily or as well as you think. No matter how good your degree is, no matter how passionate you are about what you do or how good you are about what you do.”

CURT NICKISCH: How did you get to joy from those earlier experiences, then?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: I think I always implicitly understood what joy would feel like for me in my technical career and that heart of an engineer is ultimately to see the work of our hearts, our hands and our minds get out into the world and delight the people it’s intended to serve.

We want to be seen as clever. There’s no question about that, but cleverness isn’t near enough. We want people to delight in what we’ve created. We want them to hold it in their hands or touch it with their fingertips or whatever it is that we’re engineering and later have someone who doesn’t know what we know, who uses this thing every day, look at us and say, “I got to tell you, I love this thing that you created. I use it every day. You made my life better because of this.”

And that’s really, I think, as I think about joy now, as I talk about it in my books, is we embed it in the mission statement of our company – that’s what I think about is that service to others.

CURT NICKISCH: You’re talking there about the joy of you know, a new product or creating joy for others. So how does that translate into creating a joyful workplace that creates those products? What’s the connection there?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: The connection is what I think is the thing that makes us the most human. And that is creativity, imagination, invention, innovation. That’s what every company in the planet is expecting from their teams. They want that and what I had learned, the negative lessons I had learned is fear takes that away.

I learned in the earliest days to walk up to people and say, “Hey Curt, how’s it going? What you’re working on, are you almost done? Are you coming in this weekend?” And I could generate artificial fear and I was taught. That’s what motivates people, but in fact, when we get into that fearful place, we go into fight or flight mode and it shuts down the part of our brain that we really need inside of our organization.

So that was that was one element of leadership and management that I learned early on is that we have to create an environment where those kinds of innovations that are going to thrill others can flourish. We need a different leadership style with our people. We need a different way of leading our teams. We need different processes around them that don’t feel heavy and bureaucratic, but lightweight and energizing.

CURT NICKISCH: I think the question a lot of listeners are going to have now is, so how do you try to do that at as a CEO and as a leader in your company and stay away from that urge to, you know, have fear be the driver and and let something else drive people, which is maybe a little more complicated and a little harder to measure and maybe know right away if it’s working?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah. I think it’s probably one of those things that you actually do know when it’s working. You can feel it, but articulating how you get from where you are today to where you want to go might not be quite so straightforward and not necessarily easy either. I had to reinvent myself first. I had to step away from trying to always be seen as that smartest guy in the room and the answer man because quite frankly, that’s probably what got me most of my promotions and learn how to truly craft an environment where teamwork can flourish. And the only place teamwork and flourishes in a place of high relationship – in my mind – high relationship and trust.

CURT NICKISCH: Before we get to that, I want to ask about how you decided to do that yourself. Because I think a lot of people want to be that type of leader, but there is, you know, especially after you’ve gotten all those promotions, there is a muscle memory to behavior in the workplace. You’ve also been imprinted on for years now where you have managers above you and leaders above you have been motivating you a certain way, and so how do you shake that off if you feel like there is a better way, but you’re just, you know the thing you know is something else?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: I became an avid reader. What I looked for were books like Tom Peters’ “In Search of Excellence,” Peter Drucker’s books on management, John Naisbitt’s book “Megatrends,” Peter Senge’s book “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization.” And what I found in these books were pictures and glimpses of a different way of thinking.

They were inspiring books to me. They took me off into a fantasy world of a different way to run a company or be a leader than I had been up to that point, but I was yearning for that kind of result that they were describing in the companies they were describing those books and I wanted that.

And I just kept toughing it out every day and being inspired by these books but not necessarily always making the changes that the book’s portended because you got meetings to run to, emails to answer phone calls and meetings and fires to put out and all that sort of thing.

But I never gave up the dream. I think there were two things at work here. One was an ardent search, you know, just almost like cataloging in my head – positives and negatives, positives and negatives. And that pain – I think literally the place I’m in now was birthed out of the pain of the earlier part of my career that lasted a long time. The joy that I now talk about was elusive. I never got to it, but I so wanted to get to it. I just never gave up, so I kept that search going.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s interesting, you’ve reminded me of the episode that we did with Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, and he said that his definition of innovation – and of course you’re talking about sort of innovating a different type of workplace culture – but he said his definition of innovation is when you say, “You know what I’m really sick of?” and it sounds like you were really sick of that type of company or type of job.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Absolutely. I was. And you know, and I remember one night I came home from work and it was probably a late night, dinner was probably cold in the microwave and Carol, my wife looks at me, she says, “Honey, you look really tired.” I said, “Yeah, I am.” She goes, “You also don’t look happy.” And I said, “I’m not.” And she said, “What are you going to do about it?” And I said, “I don’t know.”

At that point I was probably in my mid-thirties. Here’s what I knew: I looked ahead 30 years and I knew I couldn’t keep doing things the way I had been doing them for the next 30 years or I wouldn’t survive. It was a scary moment because this is what was feeding my family, keeping us in our house, paying for nice family vacations, a socking away, some money for eventual college educations and weddings for three beautiful daughters.

So none of this is easy and none of it is trivial and if you’ve got listeners who are struggling in the same place in their lives, I get it.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah, a lot of people think we’re about happiness and there’s nothing wrong with happiness. In fact, I think that is certainly also aspirational. We have a lot of fun at Menlo. We laugh a lot. We have a good time at work. But I don’t think it is possible to accomplish great things while being happy every minute of every day.

For us, joy is in that external focus. Joy is in serving others. Joy is in that long work done together, hard work, maybe even times, angry, cynical, sarcastic, to get from point A to point B and tough your way through the tough times. For me, it’s that delivery, that thing that you work so hard at. It’s, you know, for those of us who have raised now adult children, like I have, we understand that parenting is not happiness every minute of every day and yet there is definite joy in being a parent.

CURT NICKISCH: So when did this click for you?

Yeah. When I saw a video on the industrial design firm in California called IDEO, suddenly I had that click moment and I started racing towards a new vision for how my team would be organized. Now I was a VP at the time, so I had the perch. People kind of had to listen to me. And I made big changes quickly, and they worked and there was no way to know ahead of time that they would.

And six months into the change when everything was working really, really well beyond my wildest expectations, actually. One of my programmers pulled me aside who had been at the company much longer than me and he didn’t understand why I was willing to put everything on the line for this change that he knew I couldn’t have known it would work as well as it had and he asked me – I think he was trying to like get garner some leadership lesson for himself.

He looked at me, he says, “Rich, why were you willing to take this risk? You had everything. You had the title, the authority, the stock options, the pay – you put everything on the line for this change and you had no idea at the beginning it would work out as well as it has.” And he looked at me and says, “I don’t get it. Where did that come from?”

CURT NICKISCH: I totally understand the question because I know that that’s the situation many people get into is that it’s easy to keep the train rolling in the direction it’s going in, right? At least it’s a train you know.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yup. There’s always tomorrow, it’ll get better tomorrow, and this time I said, “Nope.” And it worked.

CURT NICKISCH: So what did you tell him?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: I looked at him and said, “David, it was easy.” Which shocked him, and I said, “because here is where I want to flip the equation: I decided that the risk of staying the same was far greater than the risk of change.” And once I made that decision in my head, racing towards change wasn’t racing towards risk, it was running away from risk. Because what was at risk was me, my heart for what I did as a profession. I knew I couldn’t keep doing this to carry my life, my family, my career another at that point probably 25 years. And so I made this fundamental choice that I’m either going to change in succeed or I’m going to change and fail and get out.

CURT NICKISCH: There’s one line in the book that kind of jumped out at me and it said that you know, your inner engineer wants an algorithm to find the right balance of optimism, realism, fear, and hope. It was interesting because you still used realism and fear. Like, you’re in an industry that has ups and downs. You have layoffs, you have projects that don’t come through. It’s a competitive risky venture even though it can go really well when it’s going well. And so, how do you work with a team and encourage them to be, you know, open and creative and also down to earth and you know, delivering?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah, the stew that I talk about of optimism, but realism and hope and fear all at the same time – we deal with it every day and what it talked about is, will never be the perfect leader. Because you can’t get rid of all fear, in fact, that wouldn’t even be healthy. You know, there’s certain fears that you absolutely want to pay attention to and keep alive.

You know, the fear of going out of business, the fear of not making payroll, fear of running out of cash, all those kinds of things are real fears that we have to pay attention to. But we have to know when our team needs us to be an optimist, and when our team needs to be a realist. I lean back on an author, I just greatly admire Patrick Lencioni in his book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” and the opening line that that book is not finance, not strategy, not technology – it is teamwork alone that remains the ultimate competitive advantage both because it’s so powerful and so rare.

And to me that’s the essence of leadership is to truly build a team, a team that me as a CEO can lean on when I’m worried, when I’m not sure about the future, that will catch me when I’m stumbling, will speak truth to power, when I need to hear that, who will also encourage me maybe when I’m not quite sure about what’s going to happen next.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. When you are being a leader, – I know you’ve stayed away from the term boss, you like the term leader, you strive to be a leader more than than a boss. What things do you do or what things do you catch yourself doing that you wish you hadn’t done to try to be a leader of this type of organization?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah, and I want to be very clear, there’s good bosses and bad bosses, there’s good leaders and bad leaders, so I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with being a boss and quite frankly, as CEO of the company, I’m absolutely a boss. No question about that.

The part where I catch myself, the part where I’m like, “Ugh, I can’t believe I did that again,” is when I start using a lot of “I” language, when I start making it about me rather than about us, about we, about the team, that sort of thing.

And I try and catch myself. But I think, look, I’m probably going to spend the rest of my lifetime unlearning all those imprinted lessons of the past and I will never be perfect at it. And so when I do dumb stuff like that – when I get angry when I shouldn’t, when I try and motivate with artificial fear like I shouldn’t – I try and catch myself sooner.

The good news is I have people around me who are willing to “speak truth to power” because they’ve been around long enough and they know they’re safe enough to do that, or they’re my wife and she’s not too concerned about it. And so, I do in those moments, try and listen. I think that’s probably another skill that I could definitely use improvement on is just basic listening skills. Spending more time with my mouth closed and my ears open.

CURT NICKISCH: It was something that was striking in the book is just how much you think about it. Like you are really analyzing the things you say and the things you do. You know, there was a story in the book how you chastise somebody for saying that he didn’t know something, even though one of the sort of things that hangs on the wall in the company is that it’s okay to say you don’t know.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: It was embarrassing because I literally chastised him while standing under the poster that said it’s okay to say, I don’t know. That was a dumb thing.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, at least you noticed, right? I mean, I think that’s the thing is that a lot of bosses – I mean is this just sounds like a lot of work too, right? It seems like you spent just a lot of time really being intentional about a lot of your actions and that might sound exhausting to some people that this really does take a lot of work.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: It does take a lot of work.

CURT NICKISCH: How do you do something really hard, like fire somebody?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah. I wish we did that well every time, but what I tell the team is when we’re going to fire somebody, I never ever want it to get to the point where that feels easy. That should be one of the weightiest decisions we make. And we’re kind of the opposite of the standard business texts in so many ways. We hire quickly and fire really slowly. We try and give people a chance to work through whatever challenge you’re having, but when it’s obvious, at a certain point it’s not going to work out, I tell the team: “Now we need to switch. This isn’t a conversation with Curt the employee. This is a conversation with Curt, the human being.”

Now we have to shift into, “hey, we’re about to let Curt go, we’re about to cut him off from the the income that’s feeding his family and while we don’t need to take grand responsibility for Curt from this moment forward, that’s still going to be mostly on him – are there things we can do for Curt right now that would ease this transition?”

And it could be as simple as give him a hug. It could be as involved as me offering up to Curt, “hey, let’s go out to lunch in a couple of weeks once you’ve had a chance to kind of collect your thoughts about where you are, to talk about where you want to go next and whether I know anybody in the community that might be able to offer you something.”

CURT NICKISCH: Do you think creating this type of company is possible anywhere at any institution?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: I think the challenge that a lot of people have when they come see Menlo, talk to us, read the books and so on, is that they do something we encourage them not to do, and that’s to state this thing of, “Oh, you’re so lucky that you get to do what you do. We couldn’t because we’re too fill in the blank. You know, we’re too big. We’re too old. We’re too regulated. We’re too unregulated were to government or too this we’re too that.

We’re a nonprofit and you know, we were too busy doing good to be good to each other. We don’t have to be nice to one another. If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else because we’re just hear about the mission.

And when I tell them is – because a lot of people look and say, “Well, you’re small. That’s why this works.” And I get that. I mean, that makes complete sense to me that you would draw that kind of conclusion. But then I look at them, and say, “You know, guys, you don’t need to change your entire corporation. You could just change the piece around you.”

If you look at Menlo, we’re about 50 people right now and you look at them and say your organization is actually composed of a bunch of 50 person fiefdoms that all fly a common flag. So even if you’re one of the largest corporations on the planet, you can change your group of 50 or your group of 100.

The story I tell in “Chief Joy Officer,” is Ron Sail’s story inside of General Electric Corporation, inside of the employee services group. And Ron made big changes just in his team alone and others would come from GE, see what they’re doing and say, “I want some of them. I want more of that. How’d you guys get to do this? Who gave you permission to do this?” And the fact of the matter is, Ron just lead. He was great leader.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s the first thing a leader should do if they want to do this at their own organization?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: T he first place change needs to occur is in the heart of the leader – I needed to become a different kind of leader first. So my encouragement to your listeners is just simply to the first turn inward. That old saying of “how can I be the change I want to see in the world?” And I think that’s really an important place to start.

A few other things I would encourage them to think about is move to an action orientation away from a contemplation orientation. In other words, you know, we have a famous phrase at Menlo, “let’s run the experiment.” Which basically says, you know what, we’re not going to spend a lot of time to thinking about this, can you go try it and see what happens? Because if we spend too much time thinking about it we’ll defeat every idea we have. And so when you move to action, it actually increases human energy. People feel the excitement, even if it doesn’t work, they’ll say: “thank God we tried it, now we know it doesn’t work.”

CURT NICKISCH: What’s one of the best actions you can take the signal to your team that this is going to be done differently and that you’re taking it to heart.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah. A lot of top leaders come to me and ask me kind of the simple practical things they could do first to send a signal that change is in the works and I smile and I look at them and say move out of your office. Turn your office into a conference room. Move yourself out into space where the rest of the team is. That’ll send the signal. And they’ll look at me and say, “Well, where would I go for private conversations?”

And I say: “about what?” And they realize that in that moment I’m asking them to change and they’re not comfortable with it and they shouldn’t be. I mean, if you’re gonna make important change – I think any important change that occurs anywhere in our life is going to start with discomfort. Think of it as like, you know, that workout routine we’re all going to start next January.

CURT NICKISCH: For kind of the other end of the career spectrum here, what would you tell the 20-something Rich or the-30 something Rich. You know, what would you tell somebody who’s at a job now where they don’t feel joy in the workplace? They’re not a manager of a team. They’re hating their job. What can they do?

RICHARD SHERIDAN: My encouragement to the young people in the world that are just starting out in their careers and maybe experiencing some version of the disillusionment I experienced first is: there are a lot of things you can do individually to lead, truly lead, and they don’t cost anything.

You don’t have to quit your job to do them. You can smile and say good morning to everybody you walk into. You can be that kind of positive energy. You can start to experiment with optimism and lead maybe just another person alongside of you to make some change inside of your organization.

You know, we get these people have come and visit us and they’re wondering if their bosses would let them do anything like we’re doing. And I say, “You know, I don’t think there’s a boss out there typically that would say, ‘Hey, how come you’re bringing so much energy to work today? Oh, where’s that smile coming from? Why why do you seem to have a bigger spring in your step today?’”

CURT NICKISCH: Joy. I rebuke thee.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: That’s right. Exactly. You know what, leave that at home. That’s not for the workplace. You know, it would have to be a pretty seriously broken boss to try and tamp down any of those kinds of things. And so you can start bringing this stuff to work. I tell that story in the book about Mike at Mcdonald’s in Detroit Metro airport who’s just like hustling around and you know, cleaning up the tables after all the busy travelers are moving through.

And every time I saw him he walked up to me and he said, “how you doing? You need a napkin or anything”? And I’m like, “no, I’m okay Mike.” He says, “Well have a safe flight.” And I thought in that moment when I saw that, I thought, “Wow, how does he do that?” And then every time I went there he did the same thing and I’m like, “What are you doing? I mean, you’re in what I, one of the most relation-less places on the planet. People are just buzzing in and out and there you are giving them a smile, asking them if they need something simple and wishing them a safe flight or a good day.” I thought if Mike can do that inside a McDonald’s, we can all do that inside of where we work .

CURT NICKISCH: Rich, this has been a real pleasure and a real joy to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on the HBR IdeaCast.

RICHARD SHERIDAN: And thanks so much for having me here.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Richard Sheridan. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations. His new book is “Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear.”

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We got technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.